Entertainment industry heavyweights partner up to bring epic Renaissance plot to room-scale VR. Michael Conelly is a prolific visual effects designer with one heck of an impressive résumé. Throughout his two decades working as Digital Effects Supervisor at Rhythm and Hues Studios, Conelly has worked on everything from the Coca Cola Polar Bears and

In the realm of what you should do for a sequel, Windlands 2 gets a lot right. Just like its predecessor, you still spend most of your time with your arms outstretched, above your head, swinging between trees. You still gasp in desperation as you attempt a last-ditch effort to hook onto that tree just outside your reach as you plummet towards the ground. And you still get frustrated at just how floaty and imprecise the movement mechanics can be from time to time.

But like any good sequel, Windlands 2 is all of that and more. This time around there’s elegant and effortless multiplayer integration for cooperative fun, a lot more action with a brand new bow, and dramatically enhanced visuals that really make the bright, colorful world pop more that ever before. Make no mistake: if you adored Windlands, like many VR early adopters, then you’re gonna find a lot to love in Windlands 2.

Windlands 2 is directly connected to the previous game in terms of lore and setting, but this time around you’re supposed to care a bit more about everything going on around you. There’s an admirable amount of world building going on this time around with lots of characters, an excellent soundtrack, and large areas ripe for exploration, but it all feels like things were placed out of necessity rather than as pieces to a living, breathing society.

For example, all of the environments, which are expansive and full of vertical layers just waiting to be explored, are completely empty. An objective might consist of reaching a handful of checkpoints or collecting a certain number of random doodads before progressing to the next boss fight, but seldom do any of the regions feel alive in the way you might expect.

Traversing the world of Windlands 2 is exhilarating. The simple act of going from point A to point B is often more exciting than even the most intense boss fight in many other VR games. When you’re nailing each grapple and swinging through the air it feels amazing. But then you fall, or miss your landing, or skid off the edge of a platform because it’s nearly impossible to cease your momentum.

In Windlands 2 there really isn’t a punishment for death at all. In fact, you’re expected to fall to your death repeatedly. You’re expected to die so much, in fact, that there is a dedicated respawn button on the controller. Rather than fine tune things like movement accuracy and combat difficulty, the developers at Psytec opted to just diminish punishment for mistakes so much to the point that you can never actually mess up.

Windlands 2 does feature two major additions that weren’t in the previous game: a bow and arrow weapon and co-op multiplayer. Thankfully, both are excellent inclusions that expand on the foundation in logical ways and enhance what already made the premise so much fun.

Obviously adding friends to any game can make it better, but it’s particularly noticeable in this case. The character models are

It’s finally happened; you can pick up a decent PC VR headset for less than $100, though there’s a bit of a catch.

Lenovo’s Explorer headset, which is part of Microsoft’s ‘Mixed Reality’ line of Windows-based devices, is down to just $99 on B&H right now (and it’s in stock at the time of writing). For a headset that offers solid inside-out positional tracking (meaning it doesn’t require extra sensors like the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive) with a 2880 x 1440 resolution, that’s a really good deal. Heck, we quite liked the headset when it was priced at $450.

With a Lenovo headset, you can runs apps from both Microsoft’s own Mixed Reality ecosystem as well as SteamVR games, provided you’ve got a PC powerful enough to run them.

The issue, though, is that this is just for the headset. It doesn’t include the six degree of freedom (6DOF) motion controllers that are essential to access many VR apps on both the Microsoft Store and SteamVR. Worse yet, Microsoft still doesn’t offer a standalone set of controllers to buy separately and the bundle with the headset and controllers is still priced at $399. You might be able to find a pair of motion controllers on eBay or something, though otherwise you’ll only be able to use a more traditional gamepad.

Still, that would mean you can still play great games like Moss and Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice. Does that make it worth the lower price of entry? Only you can answer that.

Now if we could just convince Lenovo to drop the lovely Mirage Solo standalone headset to the same price…

First Contact Entertainment’s Firewall Zero Hour made an impressive debut in the UK software charts last week (for an exclusive PSVR game), coming in just outside the top ten in the 11th spot. We’d assumed we’d see a dramatic fall for the game this week, but that’s not the case.

The VR shooter only fell three places this week, landing in 14th. Considering this is on the same week as the fastest-selling release of the year, Insomniac’s PS4-exclusive Spider-Man game, we’d say that’s a job well done.

As with last week, PlayStation VR Worlds is just a few spaces behind Firewall, this time in 17th. That’s telling as the PSVR minigame compilation comes packed in with the headset itself, which has been on offer in the UK with bundles that include Firewall at £199.99. No doubt that’s helping Firewall’s performance, though we’d like to think the sheer quality of the competitive experience has something to do with it too.

The UK charts only track physical sales, so it doesn’t account for digital copies sold via the PlayStation Store. Still, last month’s store charts for August put the game in third place for European VR charts, so it’s doing well there too. It even topped the US charts.

It won’t be too much longer until we can finally get out hands on Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown‘s exclusive PlayStation VR (PSVR) mode which, judging by this trailer, is shaping up very nicely indeed.

The below footage, which was revealed at Sony’s PlayStation Line-Up Tour showcase in Japan yesterday, gives us a brief look at the VR support that was first confirmed when the game was announced back in 2015 (!). It offers cockpit views of the series’ signature aerial combat, though it has to be said the visual fidelity of the environments surrounding the player is hugely impressive, especially for PSVR.

We do know that Ace Combat’s VR support doesn’t include the entire original campaign. Instead it’s a handful of unique missions that should take you about three hours to see through.

After several delays, Ace Combat 7 is touching down on January 17th, 2019.